Howard Beach: Black Leaders, White Liberals

...It was not just because our vanity was wounded by antiwhite rhetoric that seemed to discount our good will and our actual support and occasional sacrifice, but, more important, because we do accept blacks' own claim that ultimately a good deal of the most astute and potent leadership in resolving these matters will have to come from blacks themselves...

...In fact, Blum turned out to be an amateur actor who, returning home from watching a play at Brooklyn College, had just dropped off a black friend with whom he'd shared the stage on several occasions...

...Even more dispiriting than this want of political imagination and sheer decency is the fact that Maddox was cheered by 2,000 blacks in a high school auditorium from which the "white" press, which had so offended him by challenging his Blum scenario, was barred...

...had evoked the specter of white acquittals or minor convictions at best...

...Even New York City, now less than half white, will never have a majority of any one ethnic or racial group...

...Condescension, because the price of admission to continuing dialogue with the black editors, writers, elected officials, and lawyers whom white activists had known over the years seemed suddenly to be that whites refrain from criticizing Maddox's destructive tactics...

...I wouldn't trust Elliott Abrams any further than I could throw Oliver North...

...At certain critical moments in any struggle, only the oppressed hold the power to close the circle of redemption...

...But after consultation with his father, a police officer whose very occupation satisfied Maddox that he must have been a racist accomplice in Griffith's death, Dominick Blum returned to the scene...

...Hence rhetoric that serves only to "up the ante" by invoking a racial struggle as elemental as the one in South Africa is doomed...

...It may be appropriate to charge him with leaving the scene, and the special prosecutor has promised a full investigation of Blum's role...

...Certainly the governor has every political incentive to let the Queens D.A., already tainted by charges of prosecutorial passivity, undue political ambition, and questionable associations, be the fall guy for yielding to black demands for a special prosecutor...

...Surely no black or white leader worthy of the name dare lose sight of this elementary truth, bend though he or she must at times to the separatist or racist impulses of angry crowds...

...He was called on the carpet for that and explained differences in his testimony—not necessarily to everyone's satisfaction," Durenberger told the Miami Herald...

...But no black leader has contradicted Maddox's scenario, let alone proposed the kind of gesture to Blum that might really win whites over...

...the police killing of Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly black Housing Authority tenant...

...with a special prosecutor...

...Withdrawal from what so many black leaders called the "white" economy, "white" press, and "white" criminal justice system is really withdrawal from any chance of meaningful black survival in multi-ethnic New York...

...Alienation, because even those inclined to overlook antiwhite rhetoric find it hard to lend themselves to a "movement" that employs patently false claims and posits implicitly that blacks can go it alone in any struggle for economic justice in New York...

...We must never lose sight of the fact that the justification for black rage is real, that racism in the criminal justice system is pervasive and routine...

...wasn't doing his job...

...Although racist misconduct by police officers seems to have been a factor in the mishandling of the Howard Beach investigation immediately after the assaults, Maddox's and fellow attorney C. Vernon Mason's charges of a "cover-up" by the district attorney rested primarily on their insistence that court officer Dominick Blum, whose car struck Michael Griffith on the parkway, was an accomplice of the white assailants...

...former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, revealed that several committee members believed [Assistant Secretary of State Elliott] Abrams misled them in secret session in November about his role in seeking thirdcountry contra aid...

...Not only do burgeoning Asian and Hispanic communities encompass dozens of nationalities, but the city's 1.8 million blacks include 500,000 West Indian, Haitian, and Panamanian black immigrants whose experiences and agendas mesh imperfectly with those of American blacks...

...There is an even longer roll call of such cases on which the books have been officially closed over the past ten years but which few blacks have forgotten: the police murders of young Randy Evans and popular Bedford-Stuyvesant businessman Arthur Miller...

...LEFT BEHIND WILL BE ALL those who wonder whether Maddox's deceitful and destructive attacks were really the vehicle blacks needed to win justice, or whether, as I believe, the strategy only compounded blacks' problems as exotic appendages to the polity, playing by special rules and thereby only confirming racist whites in their prejudice...

...WASHINGTON POST, January 13, 1987 0 apparently mixed reputation or to discount Hynes's achievement, but to assess the wisdom of black strategy...

...Blum left the scene of the accident and drove home, probably terrified by the suspicion that he'd hit more than a "tire or animal," as he claimed...

...Representative Charles 153 Rangel and Judge Bruce Wright did question the wisdom of using Blum's alleged escape from "punishment" as grounds for noncooperation with the D.A...

...The point is not to defend the local D.A.'s Such a Nice Boy Last week, Senator David Durenberger (RMinn...

...The article also describes Maddox's harrowing youthful encounters with police in his native Georgia—a salutary reminder that it was "the system" that taught this man to hate...

...In short, probably the kind of ordinary white New Yorker whom any movement for racial justice would have to embrace...

...the death of Michael Stewart in Transit Police custody...

...Beirut without end...

...they also forced many white activists to choose between alienation and condescension unless they were willing to keep a safe distance and settle for platitudes...

...There will never be a murder conviction of a white man who has murdered a black man in New York City," said Alton Maddox, Jr., lawyer for one of the Howard Beach victims...

...the February 28 fatal shooting of twenty-seven-year-old Nicholas Bartlett by a group of police officers who claimed he was brandishing a lead pipe...

...The emphasis in public will be on "leaving all this behind us and moving forward...

...And that is perhaps the saddest aspect of Howard Beach, because they have so much to give...

...When one considers that even the "open-and-shut" cases mentioned above failed to contravene Maddox's dictum, the black rage that erupted in the wake of Howard Beach seems, if anything, long overdue...

...Making these points rightly leaves even white New Yorkers who are skeptical of black grievances uncomfortable...

...the killing of Harlem honor student Jonah Perry by an off-duty officer...

...Even those of us who hold white racism to be the original and enduring sin couldn't help but despair at the direction of some of the recent protests...

...and other, less publicized, cases in which perpetrators motivated at least partly by racism shattered New York's image as a liberal, racially tolerant city...

...Where was such leadership, politically and legally, in the wake of Howard Beach...

...and half a dozen more reported in the media, to say nothing of others ignored by the press but alive in black memory...

...Surely, if we can't unite, there will be no constructive change...

...A February 16 National Law Journal feature on Maddox was more forthright, detailing his long history of sabotaging cases to prove to blacks that the system can't work...

...152 WHITES CAN'T DEFLECT OR DEFUSE such rage with attempts to separate the few "open-and-shut" cases from others in which black provocation may have raised issues of legitimate white self-defense, or by distinguishing the racist from the nonracist motives of white assailants, or by reciting the toll of blackonwhite crime—including the recent murder of a white priest by a young black man who confessed to the crime, yet was acquitted thanks in part to his defense attorney, the same Alton Maddox who denounces the acquittals of murderous whites...

...Whether it's a question of educating youths like those who participated in the assaults, or winning back the Dominick Blums who should never have been lost, or of reassuring white activists that, yes, only interracial movements can win justice in America, the answer, perhaps unfairly and ironically, lies with the victims...

...It is unlikely that, should the "cover-up" charges that led to the appointment of Hynes prove unfounded, either Cuomo or Hynes will make much noise saying so...

...They got that, because the victims' and lawyers' refusal to cooperate with the D.A...

...And so there is white fear and rage and even white vigilante action to dispense "rough justice...

...For example, the mere fact of Cedric Sandiford's cooperation, however inadequate his information, helped Hynes "turn" the white youths who had held back from the D.A...

...Most of the city's black leaders, by contrast, endorsed the "cover-up" charge as a basis for demanding that Governor Mario Cuomo replace the D.A...

...Now that "instant analysis" of the Howard Beach tragedy has given way to the criminal justice process and to the combination of symbolic appropriation and amnesia that envelops such events, we need to retrieve a few lessons about leadership from the events of December through February...

...These blacks, too, are a constituency needing leadership...

...How many would...

...But it may also be true that, with black cooperation and more time, the D.A...

...the murder of black transit worker Willie Turks by a white mob not unlike that in Howard Beach...

...The question posed by Howard Beach, however, goes further: how and on what terms can whites who condemn that racism join with blacks to combat it...

...The antiwhite rhetoric, the invocations of Johannesburg, and the legal mistake of the Blum scenario not only squandered the genuine concern of many "ordinary" whites after the assaults...

...it can only be paved with new outreach and organizing, across racial lines, some of it coming, as it has most promisingly, from black trade unionists, clergy, and community leaders in Queens who have welcomed rather than rebuffed the expressions of concern and solidarity from their white counterparts...

...would have achieved similar results...

...In asking that question, we should avoid the "all's well that ends well" assumption that since the special prosecutor in the case has brought indictments the local district attorney couldn't or wouldn't, black leaders' political and legal strategies have been vindicated...

...Now that the special prosecutor has discredited Maddox's Blum scenario and his client's testimony on the way to generating stronger indictments, it seems clear that Cuomo's intervention actually saved black leaders from their own disastrous intransigence more than it vindicated their charges of bad faith at the local level...

...As with politics, so it was with legal strategy...

...Politically, many New York black leaders invoked South Africa as the mirror-image of America during the Howard Beach protests, as if ours weren't an overwhelmingly white society in which many hard-pressed whites share grievances with blacks...

...What then...

...But so far it appears that the two lawyers used him and, even when the smear was discredited, they hadn't the political wisdom or good grace to recant through some impressive gesture to Blum that could have disarmed and reconciled the frightened, alienated stratum of whites he represents...

...It fell to Jesse Jackson to make the general point, both implicitly by staying away from the protests and legal maneuverings, and explicitly in a New York Times op ed essay linking black and white working people's interests...

...Abrams testified that he had no role, Durenberger said...

...After all, the road to reconciliation won't be paved with a finding by Hynes that the D.A...

...Yes, there's an intolerable level of black crime, as they claim...

...Even given the leadership shown by Cuomo and Hynes, the answer to that question remains unclear, the more so because recent newspaper polls suggest that even most blacks doubt the 154 existence of an actual "cover-up"—though not, understandably, of police misconduct in the wake of the assaults...

...It is precisely in trying to avoid such a fate that we have to examine the performance of black leadership in the wake of Howard Beach, and to mention the sense of grievance felt by those whites who've really tried to bear witness to racist injustice and forge interracial movements deeper than the point/counterpoint of recent debates about "whose violence" is most dangerous to society...

...The brutal December 20th attack by white youths on three black men, one of them killed by a car as he fled onto a parkway in the early morning darkness, is only one in a grim docket of cases: the Bernhard Goetz subway shootings...

...The D.A.'s performance may ultimately be shown to have been inadequate compared to special prosecutor Charles Hynes's impressive concentration of effort...